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Purdue Professor Has NBA Draft Anti-Tanking Plan

I know tanking was a big topic in the Random Thoughts thread recently. This article was featured on the front page of the Purdue Student Newspaper this morning. I found it interesting but don't see this going through without a lot of adjustment. Apologies if posted elsewhere.

All of these terms reference the goals of underperforming teams in professional sports and a Purdue professor has a plan to correct the problem in the NBA.

Tim Bond, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, and former colleague Arup Sen have developed an idea to discourage tanking.

Currently in the NBA, draft picks are awarded based on a lottery and the worse a team finishes, the bigger chance the team will win the No. 1 pick.

In order to prevent purposefully losing to improve lottery percentages, Bond and Sen’s system proposes eliminating the lottery and implementing an auction based off of credits.

“You’re never going to be able to remove the incentive to lose,” Bond said. “But what you want to do is try to make the incentive to intentionally lose as low as possible.”

In Bond and Sen’s system, credits would be awarded to teams based off of their record at the end of the season, with the worst teams receiving the most credits. The credits would be storable and could be used in any draft in the future, with credits being spent not only on the top pick, but every lottery pick.

While the worst team would still receive the most amount of credits, Bond said the “flexibility in the form of rewarding credits (would) try and discourage teams from tanking.”

In addition to the credits awarded based on record, Bond and Sen’s system would add or subtract credits from teams based on an objective formula. The formula would factor in various statistics that could show whether or not a team was actively tanking during a season.

“Our goal with this formula is to use more advanced statistics than just rank order, to smooth out this formula,” Bond said. “Inside the formula would be things like (awarding) less credits if your performance in the second half of the season is worse than your first half. Basically smoothing out the payoff structure of these credits so that you didn’t have much of a benefit from losing one additional game.”

One of the worst instances of tanking in recent years that Bond and Sen cite in their article on NBA.com was the 2011 Golden State Warriors.

“One example of what we are trying to fix is the Golden State Warriors when they magically lost just enough to keep their draft pick,” Bond said. “It didn’t look very good at the time, it sort of looked like they were intentionally trying to get out of obligations.”

The Warriors’ draft pick was top-7 protected, meaning they needed to finish as one of the worst seven teams in the league or they would lose their pick to the Utah Jazz. They proceeded to trade their leading scorer Monta Ellis for an injured Andrew Bogut and sat starters Stephen Curry and David Lee with vague injuries in the late portion of the year.

The Warriors finished the season 5-22, received their top 7 pick, drafted Harrison Barnes and made the Western Conference Semifinals the next season.

In Bond and Sen’s system, the Golden State issue would have been resolved with the new system of trading credits.

“Trading credits instead of draft picks, that is something that would have addressed the Golden State problem,” Bond said. “You can’t escape that credit obligation. So that eliminates all that tanking to avoid your obligation of a protected draft pick, so that’s one thing we are able to eliminate without tweaking the formula.”

Going forward, the duo plans to continue to work on their formula and hopefully present their system to NBA representatives in the upcoming months.

“We are working to come up with a more formal proposal. I think we will know in about a month whether they are interested in getting a larger proposal from us,” Sen said. “It’s a fairly competitive process. If they are (interested), we will work on a proposal, if not we will continue to try and work on it.”

Take me out to the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back. Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me.

14 non-playoff teams in order of record, best to worst
6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 balls

Then there is no huge penalty, lottery chance-wise, for being the worst team to make the playoffs. That's just 6 balls vs. 5. Big whoop.

Last edited by Slick Pinkham; 11-06-2013 at 06:19 PM.

The poster "pacertom" since this forum began (and before!). I changed my name here to "Slick Pinkham" in honor of the imaginary player That Bobby "Slick" Leonard picked late in the 1971 ABA draft (true story!).
I'm (maybe) back after being repetedly banned, merely for supporting a different NFL team than do certain forum moderators.

Re: Purdue Professor Has NBA Draft Anti-Tanking Plan

They just need to hammer out in writing specific algorithms to define as much 'dubious' behavior as possible, and then use that to measure the behavior of losing teams, and establish a penalty system for teams when they cross one or more objective thresholds. That could be as simple as shifting their post-draft-lottery draft spots down X spots based on how 'dubious' they behaved during the season based on said algorithms.

I'm not saying putting those algorithms into writing would necessarily be easy, but I think the very least they could do is a assemble an NBA council comprised of owners, presidents, and GMs to hammer it out as much as possible to determine if there's enough tangible pieces of evidence they can work with to possibly make this reality.

Re: Purdue Professor Has NBA Draft Anti-Tanking Plan

This complicates an already complicated system, because now not only are GM's worrying about next season's draft in this scenario, but you're looking at future drafts as well. Using the 2013 Draft and 2014 Drafts as examples, teams would've spent as little credits as they could for the 13 draft to save them all for 2014. That forces teams to be really bad for multiple seasons to look for the future but hide it well.

Pretty much you could have the Bobcats skip all their obligation for 2013 if possible, then they'd bid for every spot they can get in the 2014 lottery in a loaded draft.

"It's just unfortunate that we've been penalized so much this year and nothing has happened to the Pistons, the Palace or the city of Detroit," he said. "It's almost like it's always our fault. The league knows it. They should be ashamed of themselves to let the security be as lax as it is around here."

Re: Purdue Professor Has NBA Draft Anti-Tanking Plan

Simple solution for that Golden State scenario is for the NBA to fine the Warriors a substantial amount of money and automatically forfeit the pick to Utah.

"It's just unfortunate that we've been penalized so much this year and nothing has happened to the Pistons, the Palace or the city of Detroit," he said. "It's almost like it's always our fault. The league knows it. They should be ashamed of themselves to let the security be as lax as it is around here."